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'The best books, reviewed with insight and charm, but without compromise.' - author Jackie French

Saturday, 6 October 2018

Review: Lucy's Dawn

Lucy’s Dawn begins in July 1889. It is
through Lucy’s intermittent but detailed diary entries that we follow her life
and enter the era that heralded women’s suffrage, championed by the dynamic and
influential Louisa Lawson, mother of poet Henry Lawson, who pioneered the
feminist magazine The Dawn.

Her
striking personality, intelligence, forcefulness and achievements are visible
in every reference to her.

Fourteen year old Lucy has been helping her father
in his printery and has won the spelling bee two years in a row. When he hears
that Louisa Lawson, owner and editor of The
Dawn magazine (who only employs women and girls) is looking for a
proof-reader who can spell properly, he knows Lucy is perfect for the job.

An office girl is less than what Lucy wants to be.
But it is an income after working for her father without pay. There she meets
and immediately develops a crush on the twenty-two year old Henry Lawson. Lucy
daydreams of being the love of his life. But the red-haired Charlie, who sees
Lucy as a smashing bit of jam, stands
waiting in the background.

But during the late 1800s, women’s positions in the
workplace are categorized. It is considered unnatural that they work at men’s
tasks; steal jobs from them by working for less. To men it is a given that
women’s employment is only to be found as servant, maid, housekeeper and
governess, and this in preparation for marriage.

It is fear of men losing their jobs to women that
forces the Unions to take action. Trouble with gangs paid to intimidate female
workers forces Louisa to hire guards to man the entrance to her printery. Meanwhile,
Lucy’s sister Julia has fallen for the obnoxious, double-faced and suspect
Archie Venables, leader of the trouble-makers. Can Lucy persuade Julia that
what she sees is not really who Archie is?

There is a strong sense of time and place in this
historical novel based of fact. It cleverly depicts the hard work, long hours,
poor pay and conditions that women were subjected to as domestic servants, and
their longing for rights and equality.

It defines the era and the many firsts connected to
it such as the public use of electricity, Sydney’s burgeoning café society, the
opening of new department stores such as David Jones, and the tea houses opened
by Chinese tea importer Mei Quong Tart that saw a new space become available to
women to visit and socialize.

The seven pages of Historical Notes that finish the
book give an overview of Sydney in 1889, a view of the tremendous public
buildings that were destroyed a year later in the Great Fire, plus the
historical happenings in New South Wales of that time.